Resumen (otros idiomas)

This work aspires to provide additional tools to the field of intercultural communication and pragmatics by proposing two constructs: Institutional Framework and Institutional Practice. These two constructs rest on the ideas developed by John Searle in his theory of institutional reality (1995, 2010) which centers on the assumption that the assignment of meaning is an inherently human phenomenon. Therefore, social reality is socially constructed and ontologically subjective. According to Searle, a key attribute that capacitates humans to create social reality is language, implying that social reality is essentially linguistic: Constituted by representations based on human intentional states, collectively imposed on actions, objects and states of affairs. Social reality is linguistic in that it exists insofar as our linguistic human capacity enables us to create and represent things as having meaning and functions that they wouldn’t ordinarily have if it weren’t for us. How is this relevant to better understand intercultural communication and pragmatics, and justifying going beyond utterance analysis in this field? To answer this we will need to approach the matter of culture and explore what culture is within the scope of this work. According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” and he takes “culture to be those webs” (1973:5). This definition is relevant here because we can start piecing together that culture, being webs of significance spun by man, corresponds with the notion of human intervention in the constitution of social reality. Culture, with all its webs of significance and representations accounts for a primary constituent of the social reality that we create and inhabit. So, going beyond analyzing utterances makes sense in understanding the interaction in intercultural communication because culture and society, being constituted by an array of conventions of meaning and symbolic representations become a type of language, so to speak, and they come to have degrees of intelligibility. In linguistics “when speakers of different linguistic entities can understand one another” (Campbell 2004:191) their languages are said to be mutually intelligible: However, “entities which are totally incomprehensible to speakers of other entities clearly are mutually unintelligible” (2004:217). In this sense Kristeva is insightful when she says, “the law governing…. affecting any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e. that it is articulated like a language” (1973:1249)...